Hearing Pete Seeger

I went over to Bryant Park yesterday afternoon, behind the New York Public Library, to hear Pete Seeger, whom I admire. I wrote a profile of Seeger a few years ago, which became a book, and which allowed me to spend a little bit of time with him. The occasion for the profile was Bruce Springsteen’s releasing a record of songs that Seeger had sung, called “The Seeger Sessions.” At the time, Seeger had been occupying a very active, but relatively unharassed, old age. He was eighty-eight when I visited him. He is now ninety-three. Springsteen’s attention brought him back to the world’s eye, and then to the Obama inauguration. I think Seeger was pleased, but for practical reasons. The notice gave him a larger platform for his views. The added volume of mail it brought to his already besieged house, and the invitations to receive awards and honorary degrees, I don’t think he cared for.

I didn’t really know who Seeger was when I went to interview him. He was a figure for a generation slightly older than mine. I knew the song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and I thought it was a nice enough song, but fixed in its period. I didn’t know that Seeger had stood up to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and had chosen to go to jail instead of coöperating with them. He had available to him the right to take the Fifth Amendment, which is what many people did, including Paul Robeson, but he felt that doing so had a suspicion attached to it, a taint of the suggestion of guilt, and he felt no desire to live with a shadow of any kind hanging over him. An appeal saved him from going to jail, but he had been right up against it.

Beforehand, Seeger had been a member of the Weavers, a quartet that was the last popular band of stature before the Beatles changed everything. The Weavers had been on the cover of Time magazine, and Seeger had grown accustomed to being recognized, but he didn’t like it. After his engagement with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the government set about damaging Seeger’s career. He simply walked away from the nightclub life and the fancy people and went back to singing in schools and camps, where he had begun. I can’t imagine a popular entertainer today who would go to jail for a year then throw over his or her career in order to embody a stand of conscience.

Seeger’s appearance in Bryant Park was intended to promote a book of his writings that has just been published, called “Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words.” A professor from Wesleyan named Rob Rosenthal, and his son Sam, spent several years going through Seeger’s letters and files and found writings he had never published and assembled them. About a hundred and fifty people waited in the heat to buy copies of the book. Another hundred or so sat beneath a tent by the Forty-Second Street side of the park. When Seeger arrived, he was given an ovation. He was tall and thin and slumped a little—a concession, I guess, to his age.

He stood with a banjo around his neck and listened while the composer David Amram played a piece on his flute, and then Rosenthal and his son read from the book. The first letter, written in the nineteen-thirties to Seeger’s stepmother from Avon Old Farms, the boarding school he went to, asked if he might come home for the approaching three-day weekend, and said that he wanted to buy a banjo. In another letter, he wrote, “You may have heard that I have been cited for contempt of Congress.” And he added, “Toshi and I aren’t scared.” Toshi is his wife, whom he married in 1943. He wrote Woody Guthrie, in 1956, that he had recently heard some of Guthrie’s children’s songs, which struck him so powerfully that he felt like backing up and taking off his hat and bowing. Throughout the letters, Seeger’s spirit was generous and loving. “Do you remember Brooklyn Speedy, the paregoric addict?” he wrote Guthrie. Brooklyn Speedy was a hitchhiker Seeger and Guthrie had picked up when they were driving across the country as young men. Speedy had one leg. He had Seeger go into a drugstore for him and buy paregoric. Seeger asked for the amount Speedy had requested and the druggist asked why he wanted it. Seeger said what Speedy had told him to say, which was that the paregoric was for a sick infant. The druggist said, That much paregoric will keep an infant asleep for a month—but he gave it to him. Speedy drank off the paregoric in one draught.

Sometimes while the editors read, Seeger stared off as if he were picturing the people or the event described. Then the microphones broke down. Seeger managed to have everyone sing a song with him by repeating the words to the people in the front row who could hear him, then having them repeat them for the people in the back. His voice was wobbly and not very loud but passionate. The halting quality of the lines, passed from one group of people to another, made them seem as if they were part of a protest song that was too dangerous to sing all at once. Seeger put his hands to his mouth and shouted one line at a time. “Through all this world of joy and sorrow,” he yelled.

Rosenthal spoke once more, briefly, about collecting Seeger’s words. He said that over and over, he found letters to Seeger saying, I’m in the middle of my own political struggle and what has kept me going is your music. “From people all over the world,” Rosenthal said. Seeger has never cared for praise, but he took it.

Photograph by Bennett Raglin/WireImage/Getty Images.

Alec Wilkinson, a regular contributor, is the author of ten books, including “The Protest Singer” and “The Ice Balloon.”